


Still Farther and Beyond, We Race

by OphelieduLac



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Give my goddamn faves a happy ending ffs, Help I've lost complete control of my life, Hogwarts, Regulus Black Lives, Remus Lupin has a place to live, Sirius Black is exonerated, ft. several canon deaths but also several non-canon saves, pure self-indulgence, references to alcoholism, some very grey morality from several characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27219343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OphelieduLac/pseuds/OphelieduLac
Summary: If you're going to stumble wildly and blindly through life, do it with gusto.Who knows, maybe you'll even alter the course of history.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Sirius Black/Original Female Character
Comments: 13
Kudos: 35





	Still Farther and Beyond, We Race

**Author's Note:**

> What’s up fuckers, it’s 2020, JKR is a TERF, and I wrote a self-indulgent OC to fulfill my teenage dream of fucking Sirius, feeding Remus soup, keeping Regulus alive, and adopting Harry. Fuck the rules and fuck the police.
> 
> To be quite frank, this is actually an outline— I wrote it to get it off my chest mid-HP re-read, and then four different people told me to publish it as-is. I caved to peer pressure. 
> 
> Short FAQ: 
> 
> Q: Don’t you have an OC story floating around for a completely different and unrelated fandom that you should’ve finished years ago?  
> A: 100%. 
> 
> Q: Doesn’t it imbue you with Deep Shame that you’ve yeeted yourself from one OC fic to another?  
> A: 1000%. 
> 
> Q: Do you regret writing this?  
> A: Fuck no.

Ilene Callum’s mother was a piece of shit.

Elspeth Callum was the youngest in a house of minor purebloods. As some of his most prominent English supporters, her three older brothers had been killed in Grindelwald’s service on the continent, and her two older sisters had both borne heirs for their husbands and summarily died in childbirth. She thought that maybe she could have a different life. When she’s up the spout out of wedlock to her muggleborn boyfriend, though? She beats a hasty retreat to her widowed mother’s arms, horrified at herself. Henry Digne had only been a fling, after all, never meant to be a serious boyfriend. She’d only dated him to piss off her mother (which had worked,  _ thankyouverymuch _ )!

Adora Callum, sensing an opportunity, catches the pregnancy early enough, brokers a breakup between Elspeth and Henry, and sends her daughter to Austria, conspicuously adding a pilgrimage to Grindelwald’s prison to the itinerary. When Elspeth returns, visibly pregnant, it’s easy enough for Adora to begin dropping hints that it might be Grindelwald’s. 

The plan would’ve gone off without a hitch if Henry hadn’t confronted the pair at the Ministry. Henry put two and two together and tried to beg Elspeth to see reason, to stop with this insane charade. The pair publicly used the Cruciatus Curse on him, and there were enough witnesses at the Magical Registrar to earn them a conviction and sentencing to Azkaban. 

Elspeth’s sentence was stayed, however, until such time as she gave birth. She has enough time to name the girl Ilene Elspeth and beg Henry—who is finally given the child—that Ilene keep  _ her _ last name, not the muggle name of her father. 

Surprisingly, Henry obliges. He’d been a muggleborn Slytherin and understood pureblood political maneuvering in a way that few people expected, largely in-part due to his upbringing as the intended heir for his parents’ wealth. With the last name, Ilene would be afforded the Callum family fortune when Elspeth passed, and the pureblood name recognition. 

Unfortunately, he was also aware of the sheer efficacy of Adora and Elspeth’s rumor mill— someone leaks to the press that Henry is raising Elspeth’s child. Almost immediately, speculation begins once again on Ilene’s true parentage; to that end, he moves them into his parents’ home and raises her in a largely muggle environment with the help of his parents. Ilene grows up loved and for want of nothing. She attends muggle primary school but remains keenly aware of magic. She’s a bit of a chaotic child with a wild sense of curiosity and zero tolerance for bullies but remains acutely insistent on fitting in with the other kids. 

Around the age of ten, Henry explains to her why her last name is not the same as his, and the rumors about Grindelwald and her mother without much sugarcoating. Ilene isn’t enthused by this, and after weeks of alternating between screaming and a cold shoulder, she demands to know everything she can about Grindelwald, and pores over news articles and speculations about her parentage. By the time she boards the train for Hogwarts, she has a plan for her entrée into the Wizarding world. 

(On the train, she meets Lily and Severus; Snape looks at her with keen interest when he hears her last name, but Lily doesn’t recognize her name, and the three of them end up chatting for the trip.)

Whispers break out when her name is called for the Sorting. She ignores them and jams the Hat onto her head, and as it begins to tell her that she would be a “good Slytherin” she launches into a prepared entreaty to convince it to put her literally  _ anywhere _ but Slytherin, that she has to convince everyone that she’s not evil, that Slytherin will start her on the wrong foot if everyone already thinks she’s Grindelwald’s, that she’s already going to spend her life telling people that she’s Henry’s daughter, so why make it any harder? The Hat tries one last time to convince her that she shouldn’t write off Slytherin, since her father actually  _ was _ one, but she holds firm, so after a solid two minutes of wearing it, the Hat yells “Gryffindor!” (The Gryffindor table, already reeling from the surprise shock of getting a Black, claps in confusion). She’s a little shocked too, considering that she’d fully expected Ravenclaw, or worse— to be put in Slytherin regardless of her wishes. A few older kids scoot away from her when she sits at the table, so she’s elated when Lily sits down next to her shortly afterwards without any such hesitation.

(She gets a letter from her Dad the next day that says that while he’s proud of her for getting Gryffindor, he can only root for  _ her _ , not for her house in any competitions she might be in. Old rivalries die hard.)

As it turns out, Ilene’s Master Plan is to a). Outright deny that Grindelwald might be her father whenever accused, and b). Act as harmless and carefree as possible. Zero sense of escalation, this girl. The former doesn’t seem to really work on the populace of Hogwarts at large (apart from a handful of students in her year, mostly muggleborns), but the latter has more success. She goes to great efforts to avoid ever being seen doing homework, goofs off during classes or study halls, never shows anger or displeasure, and largely lets people walk all over her. Lily, despite initial consternation and outright annoyance with this behavior, finds out quickly that it’s an act, that Ilene is doing her homework by wandlight after everyone thinks she’s gone to bed, that she actually cares deeply about all her classes, that she’s actually very broken up about her Acceptable on their most recent Herbology quiz when she finds Ilene crying by herself in the first-floor girls’ toilet, trying desperately to scrub rude graffiti off her textbooks the Muggle way. Ilene swears Lily to secrecy, explaining everything in an undertone and answering her questions, since Severus had previously told Lily that Grindelwald was believed to be her father. Lily fully adopts Ilene as a friend at that point, forming a friend group with the two of them and Severus (Ilene isn’t the biggest fan of Snape, since he seemed genuinely disappointed that Grindelwald wasn’t her father, but she lives with it for Lily’s sake). 

The other group that seems to silently support Ilene are Black, Potter, Lupin, and Pettigrew, who endorse her complete overt refusal to take anything seriously. She’s not friends with them per se (too close to Snape and Lily for that), but she’s lied on their behalves enough times in her callous disregard for any rules that they’ll occasionally give her heads-up when they’re about to set-off a large-scale prank (then again, they do that for a number of different Gryffindors over the years, so she doesn’t feel particularly special). The four of them also seem to take her at her word that she’s not Grindelwald’s kid, so that’s another point in their favor. She serves enough detentions with the lot of them to form individual opinions of them— James is Pure of Heart, Dumb of Ass; Sirius has a noble streak three miles wide, a short fuse, and is admirably escaping a family shadow longer than hers; Peter is quieter and less abrasive but more mischievous and cunning than most people realize and Remus, for all that he goes to lengths to act like an upstanding citizen, is absolutely chaotic, egged on by the reckless natures of his friends. She thinks they’re all delights. 

(She figures out Remus’ secret entirely by chance halfway through fourth year— after she’d noticed that his illness would often mean that he’d miss the Ancient Runes class that they shared without any of their friends, she started taking notes for him. She had a habit of dating the notes she took, and after a February full moon, happened to glance at the dates from the last several months in preparation for a test— they all lined up with full moons. Combined with an open muggle history book that her father had sent her that detailed the origins of Ancient Rome— Romulus and Remus, the boys raised by a wolf— it doesn’t take her too long to put two and two together. The idea of Remus being a ‘menace’ is so antithetical to everything she knows about him— a menace to Slytherins and Honeydukes and old portraits, maybe, but society at large? Wack. 

She quietly hands over the notes when she catches him alone in the common room the next day, this time with a bottle of Dittany and a whispered “Go take a nap, you’re probably exhausted after last night” and swans away. The  _ next _ day, she’s forcibly tugged into an empty classroom by the other three and sternly interrogated at wandpoint about what she knows and threatened with disembowelment if she tells anyone, all before she has a chance to open her mouth. She briefly drops the long-standing facade and reminds them simply that she knows what it’s like to be hated and feared for something out of her control, and that she doesn’t wish it on anyone, least of all Remus. Ilene stomps out of the classroom after that and goes back to acting like a ditz, loudly spending dinner gossiping about Witch Weekly’s Most Eligible Bachelor with a couple other girls. The boys watch her, scrutinizing.) 

Fourth year ends up being a watershed year for a number of reasons. Kids in their year start properly dating, and Ilene develops a somewhat promiscuous reputation, between both the factual number of times she’s caught in a broom closet (only thrice) and the number of older boys who seem to want the street cred of having bagged Grindelwald’s daughter. Trying to avoid confrontation, she silently takes all of it. One Ravenclaw sixth year gets hexed into the hospital wing when he calls her a slut in the earshot of Lily and Peter. While Ilene largely wears the insults on her sleeve and plays up the reputation as an extension of her harmlessness, Lily finds her crying in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom several times. 

The other big thing to come out of their fourth year is rumblings about a new Dark Lord. Others downplay it, but Henry Digne is immediately on alert. His letters to Ilene begin stressing that the world he’s seeing around him reminds him uncannily of what Grindelwald wreaked on the continent. Ilene tries to ignore it for a time, but when she puts her ear to the ground at school, she notices an uptick in blood prejudice, even more than she’d previously been made aware of. Snape had already been gravitating away from her and Lily toward the meaner kids in the pureblood Slytherin families, and now they hardly ever saw him as he tried to blend in with his new friends who seemed to value blood status above all. Even other houses start showing increased consciousness of blood status. There hasn’t been an outbreak of violence yet, but if her dad’s letters are to be believed, it’s only a matter of time. 

(Ilene doesn’t know why Dumbledore calls her into his office—she didn’t do anything wrong, didn’t get into any trouble. In fact, all the headmaster has done is offer her tea and sweets and ask how she likes her classes. She drops the façade only a tiny bit, just to let herself gush about Runes and Defense, and like a curtain she’s stepped on, the whole thing comes crashing down.

After talking for a while, the headmaster remarks, “If it helps at all, Miss Callum, you’re the spitting image of your father.”

She freezes.

“Ah, my apologies. Henry, I mean.”

And Ilene exhales, feeling a large weight tumble off her chest.)

During the summer, Henry offers a couple weeks in the South of France to Ilene—who brings Lily with them. It’s ostensibly for a vacation to a Digne family property, but both girls notice that they hardly see him during the day, only ever for meals. Ilene talks to her dad, who admits that he’s making arrangements for the remainder of his family to move to France to avoid the war that he sees as inevitable— as the muggles and muggleborn who raised Elspeth Callum’s daughter, they’re likely to be targeted by a pureblood supremacist looking to clean house. Ilene doesn’t want to believe it, but through a long series of letters with Lily over the summer and conversations with her father (“Sweet Merlin,” her dad breathes, laughing when she finally tells him about how she’s trying to fight the stigma of her name at school. “I know this won’t sound like a compliment, but I mean this in the most complimentary way possible: you might’ve been a  _ good _ Slytherin.”), Ilene comes to the conclusion that  _ maybe _ it’s time to drop the facade and act like herself. If the world is about to go to shit, she might as well fight back on her own terms, not the terms of a careful ruse constructed for everyone else’s comfort. And it’s just in time for OWLs.

(Henry also gives her a very belated Talk in as clinical a manner as possible, ending with “in conclusion, virginity may be a social construct, but please use protection and birth control. I am  _ begging _ you.”)

Bolstered by Lily at her back, Ilene takes the entire school by surprise— professors and all— by actively partaking in class, openly excelling at her courses instead of hiding her grades and refusing to behave like a doormat. One seventh year calls her a “Dark Whore” when she rejects his advances, and with visible rage, she punches him right in the nose, breaking it. The detention she gets is wholly worth it, as is the satisfaction of finally standing up for herself. She doesn’t completely drop her promiscuous reputation—she’s a horny teenager, and she’s already got the rep— but to the world at large, she’s grown a backbone, slinging insults and curses and fists. 

(“You’re loads more fun like this, y’know,” Sirius chirped at her as they’re stuck in detention together, scrubbing trophies with a toothbrush. “Never did seem right that you let everyone walk all over you like that. I don’t think Mulligan’s nose got healed properly, cheers.”

“Good.” She barks a laugh, and he grins.)

The atmosphere of the school feels more tense, like they’re waiting for a stretched rubber band to snap and strike all of them. That doesn’t stop them from all getting hauled into Career chats; Ilene’s turns into a long discussion with McGonagall about her complete turnaround in personality, and of her aptitude for Defense and Runes. McGonagall steers her toward Cursebreaking or Auror Training, which she hadn’t previously ever considered as occupations (though, she’d never even thought about her post-Hogwarts life at all). Everyone tumbles headfirst into studying for their OWLs; Ilene’s preferred form of study break, as it turns out, is a romp in a broom closet with a fifth year Ravenclaw who she sees on and off. 

Somewhere down the line, a rumor starts circulating that Ilene and Sirius were seen exiting the same broom closet, probably since she and Sirius have similar reputations. Both Ilene and Sirius are baffled by this and have a good laugh, but neither her semi-boyfriend nor Sirius’ girlfriend find it so funny. While her semi-boyfriend calls it off despite her protests (citing her ‘reputation’ and then dodging a hex for his trouble), Sirius’ girlfriend decides that the best course of action is to confront Ilene in a girls’ bathroom, in front of an audience. After cornering her against a sink and calling her as many rude names as she can despite Ilene’s protests that it never happened, Ilene—consumed with rage and ever the master of subtlety— stares her dead in the face and calmly intones, “if you make eye contact with me again, I will pluck yours out and eat them.” 

Suddenly, the Grindelwald’s Daughter rumors are back in full force. Students give her a wide berth in the hallways, and whispers of the bathroom confrontation swirl the school. Contrary to what she’d expected, Lily actually finds the whole situation hilarious once she gets the context (“I’m sorry, you said  _ what _ ?”). James and Peter, hearing about the exchange, guffaw like donkeys, before deciding to sarcastically threaten eye-eating for any minor inconvenience; if she didn’t know better, she’d think they were mocking her.

(“Did you really tell Gemma you’d eat her eyes?” Sirius asks over breakfast, conversationally as you please.

“Sorry?” She ventures, feeling crummy for having lost her cool that badly, and because Gemma’d broken up with Sirius shortly after, and also because someone graffiti’d ‘Evil Bitch’ all over Ilene’s Herbology gear at some point last night. 

“Nah, she was clingy anyway. Besides,” and he shoveled a fork full of eggs into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, “Marlene said she’d cornered you. I’m jus’ shocked you didn’t deck her like you did Mulligan.”)

To the stress of fifth years everywhere, OWLs come and go, and Ilene bears witness to the death knell of the Lily-Severus friendship (and by extension, the Ilene-Lily-Severus friendship), and as well to the car crash that is James and Sirius practically flaunting their crueler sides. This time, she’s comforting a very tearful Lily (though they’ve fully outgrown hiding in Myrtle’s bathroom), and as fond of James and co. as she is, Ilene’s probably as pissed with them as she is with Snape for slinging a slur like that. 

(“Psst!” Sirius grabs her arm as she exits the train compartment, looking for the bathroom. “Hey, Ilene—“

“If it’s not an abject apology, I don’t think Lily wants to hear it. She’s  _ livid _ , Sirius.” That wasn’t entirely true— Lily was also extraordinarily dejected at the loss of her friendship with Snape, but no one needed to know that.

To be quite honest, Ilene’s already biased against Snape to begin with; that doesn’t mean she’s about to break the proverbial picket line here. 

“But it’s  _ Snivellus _ —" Sirius whines, and oh  _ boy _ , Ilene is not having any of this shit today.

“Listen,” and she jabs a finger into his chest with every word she hisses, making him step back toward the windows, “that was  _ cruel. _ Snape’s her friend.”

“Wha—Ilene, what he called her—”

“But until that moment—” Jab “—he was still—” Jab “—her friend. You drove him to it. You—” Jab “—are at fault here.” Ilene’s got him pinned against the windows by a finger, breathing in his face, Sirius watching her with some mix of annoyance. “Look, I don’t disagree that he would’ve said it eventually, but the fact that it happened when it did is  _ your  _ fault. Tell Potter that acting like a fucking sociopath isn’t going to endear him to her, if that’s what he really wants.” Realizing her proximity, she steps back. “And if you could both learn some fucking subtlety, that would be greatly  _ fucking _ appreciated.”

“Cauldron, kettle.” 

“Fuck off, Black, I’ve gotta piss.”

“Charming.”)

Over the summer, she inadvertently catches up with Ellie, one of the girls she’d gone to muggle primary school with, explaining away her absence as “attending Swiss boarding school”; Ellie buys it and instead introduces her to a whole host of muggle bands that she’d never heard of, but instantly falls in love with. Unsupervised, the two of them run around muggle London attending concerts and meeting bands and learning more about the underground clubs, and if they get drunk and make-out and grope each other more than would be normal for two gals just bein’ pals, well, neither of them talks about it much, even if Ilene wants to watch the lights of the venues twinkle in her bright blue eyes forever. It ends with the arrival of September, and when she goes back to Hogwarts, she goes back with a consuming love of muggle music, a collection of band t-shirts and records, and the horrifying foreboding that things would start going wrong this year. 

She’s pleasantly surprised to find that James and Sirius have been making actual efforts to not be gits (Peter, telling her this, wipes away an imaginary tear and sighs mock-forlornly that they’re “growing up,” making her snicker). Lily and James have a tentative truce now, and despite James’ well-known crush on her, it looks like he’s making an effort to give her space, which Ilene heartily approves of. 

(“Am I hallucinating, or does your shirt say: ‘York Doll?’” Sirius scoots closer to her, uselessly scrubbing the same section of floor to speak without alerting Filch, who was standing outside the door.

Turns out that getting into a duel outside of a classroom, even if you’re defending a first year from bullies, is still highly frowned upon.

“‘New York Dolls.’ They’re a muggle band, I got to see them play over the summer.”

“Are they any good?”

“The best, I reckon. Lots’a energy. I’ve got their vinyl, if we can get a record player?” She raised an eyebrow in his direction, feeling a smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth.

Sirius returns her smirk with a full-blown grin, laughter dancing in his grey eyes.)

Even if she’s only swapping vinyls with him (and she’s using the term ‘swapping’ here very loosely, since she’s bringing the vinyls and he’s only bringing the contraband record player and a passing knowledge of the Beatles), people start noticing that they seem to be spending more and more time together, and once more, rumors fly. Apparently, it doesn’t help at all that they actually talk to each other while they listen, that he’s told her he ran away from home, that she’s worried at him about her family, and that all of a sudden, it seems that she knows so much more about him than ever. It gets to the point where even Lily has to ask her flat-out if she’s seeing Sirius, and Ilene has to respond that  _ no _ they’re not seeing each other, they’re only mutually enjoying the Sex Pistols and  _ Lily Evans, get your mind out of the gutter! _

(Remus, from a few seats over, laughs so hard he falls off the bench.)

Either way, both she and Sirius put the rumors to rest for the time being by being seen cavorting with others, Sirius apparently disappearing into a broom closet with half the female population and Ilene spotted a handful of times in Madame Puddifoot’s with the Captain of the Hufflepuff Quidditch team. The whole drama over their love lives is so diverting that they almost manage to forget the proverbial storm cloud brewing over Wizarding Britain. That is, of course, until the Daily Prophet’s headlines become consistently bleak, with stories of muggle deaths; it really hits home when on one dreary day in November, a muggleborn third-year Gryffindor gets pulled out of class to learn that her family had been murdered. Ilene gets a short letter from her father later that night: “Out of the woods for now, setting up shop in the new place. Stay at Hogwarts for Christmas, I’ll come pick you up at year-end.” She fully misses the sympathetic look that Lily is shooting her, too mired in her own mixed emotions. Her dad and grandparents are safely in France? Great! Awesome! She loves to see it! She has to stay at Hogwarts for Christmas because of it? Less fun. She hadn’t ever experienced a single Christmas apart from them.

(“Lily,” she hissed, watching her friend climb through the curtains around her bed, casting a muffling charm on their conversation, “what are you doing?”

Lily—the teachers’ pet, the prefect, the most-likely-to-be-Head-Girl—produces a whole bottle of firewhiskey from within her sleeve as she sits on the other end of the bed and uncorks it with the ease of someone who’s done it many times before. “You looked terrible today at dinner when you got that letter. I thought we could talk about it.”

Ilene takes a swig, winces only slightly, and passes the bottle back. “You’re incredible and I love you, you know that? You got a favor from Potter for me?”

It’s a trick of the already dim light that makes Lily’s face look slightly darker as she takes a sip, “Well  _ he _ owed me.”)

Ilene doesn’t tell her father that she spends Christmas with the Evanses—she’d met them a few times previously, but they were thrilled to invite her over, especially when they heard that her whole family had just moved to France and she’d be all alone otherwise. (The only exception to the pleasant holiday is Petunia, Lily’s grumpy older sister). Her gifts all make their way to her regardless—the joys of owl post—but the big surprise was getting a gift from Sirius. They’d never previously been close enough to actually swap Christmas gifts, but he sends her  _ Sheer Heart Attack _ . In return, she sets out on Boxing Day with Lily to acquire a copy of  _ Paranoid _ , and quickly bundles that off back in the direction of Sirius (he’s quickly becoming an aficionado under her tutelage, she likes to tease him). 

Something crackles in the air when they all resume after New Years’. Ilene feels herself pulled in all directions over the remainder of the year. Her second career counseling appointment with McGonagall steers her in the direction of Curse-breaking starting in February; she has to take an independent study in Phoenecian Runes to make sure that she stands out among the candidate pool. Carrington, the Hufflepuff Quidditch captain and ostensible boyfriend, demands more of her time somewhere around mid-March. Sirius is demanding  _ her _ time in greater and greater amounts, clearly hoping to work his way through her whole vinyl stack, all while undertaking the task of snogging every eligible witch in the school barring her and Lily. Muggles are dying left and right on the pages of the Prophet, and several of the younger kids have been fully withdrawn from the school. Her dad’s letters are fewer and farther between, even as he does his level best to reassure her that they’re all fine, that Granddad Ernie has taken up boules and Grandma Rosie has become the ringleader of her new French bridge group and he himself has been working out of the branch office in Marseille with little issue. She’s gotten at least six detentions for dueling and tardiness, and for ending fights between pureblood bullies and unwitting muggleborns. Lily and James appear to be moving past truce and arriving at an alliance heretofore unknown, and Ilene can read the telltale blush on her friend’s face. Everything is happening so fast. 

By the time exams come in May, her sanity is hanging by a thread, and ten minutes after breaking up very publicly with Carrington—who called her an evil slag and who she called a coercive cunt—she proceeds to unload all of it— _ all of it _ —on Sirius, the poor bastard who’d just wanted to listen to  _ Wish You Were Here _ with her in an empty classroom. 

Instead of saying anything right away, he gathers her into a hug and just lets her sob into the front of robes as they sit on top of the bureau desk. He mutters, “it’s gonna be okay, you’re gonna be okay” into her hair while rubbing circles into her back, letting her just crumble because it’s clear that it’s all pent-up and horrible and Carrington was just the straw that broke the Erumpent’s back.

(“I—hic—sorry, I’d heard that you’re terrible with crying girls.”

“Nah, ’m terrible with girls crying because of something  _ I  _ did. Can’t really comfort that. You, on the other hand, just needed to let it all out.”

“Oh, yeah. That makes sense.”

“Carrington’s an absolute wanker, y’know. Wouldn’t know a quality bird if she pecked his eyes out.”

“…are you telling me to eat his eyes?” She felt the beginnings of a laugh bubbling in her chest.

“A joke! See, you’re feeling better already!” And he beamed at her and pressed a quick kiss to the crown of her head, and her stomach lurched at both actions like the times she’d rolled into bed with Ellie and—

Oh. 

_ Oh no _ .)

She makes it out of term with her dignity intact, managing to survive all her album-listening sessions with Sirius like her heart didn’t slam in her chest every time he smiled, or tried to coax her into dancing along to the songs. Has this always been happening? When had it started?  _ WHY _ was this happening?

Okay, maybe it wasn’t happening? Maybe it was hormones, and the fact that he’d been so kind to her when she was so sad and vulnerable. But that doesn’t sound right, and she thinks about the bitterness that had flowed through her when she’d seen him cavorting around the school in the latter half of the year with girl after girl after girl. At the time, she’d written it off as a wistfulness, to not be bothered by Carrington. Was that jealousy? Merlin’s balls, that was jealousy. 

There wasn’t a happy ending to this, not at all. He was her friend, and she’d taken advantage of his kindness and friendship and completely misconstrued it as romance and now here she was, fantasizing about him. How rude and fucked up was that? He could never know that she’d been smacked in the face with the Sirius Black pheromones just like everyone else. 

Thankfully, Sirius sits in a compartment with the rest of his friends, so Ilene’s train ride home with Lily and Marlene is unblemished by her own emotions; when the train pulls into the station, she wastes no time in throwing herself from it, promising to write, and sprinting full tilt at her dad. Her father takes it for the reunion that it at least partially is and zips the two of them off the platform with a small portkey; in seconds, the house in Marseille towers over her. 

Her seventeenth birthday—the 6 th of July—comes and goes and she is still trapped in the French countryside. Her dad suggests that she take the muggle drivers’ license exam; she has to shoot this suggestion down, as she does not speak French. If she’d known this would happen, maybe she would have asked her grandmother to teach her French as a kid instead of German (not like she’s any better at  _ that _ ). In some ways, the isolation is a welcome detox. 

(Ilene is climbing the walls. She can’t come back after graduation lest she go absolutely insane.)

By the time September 1 comes around again, she speaks only some French and still can’t drive, but has a deep tan and an internal grip on her own feelings about Sirius. It would be fine. She’d clearly been hormonal and had a deep and emotional reaction in a moment of weakness and had temporarily misread their friendship as a romantic endeavor. It would be fine. She’s fine.

Upon spotting her on the platform, Lily practically bowls her over in a hug; Marlene follows suit, and soon half of their Gryffindor year-mates swarm her.

(She is not fine. One look from Sirius and her insides melt. One smile, and her knees nearly collapse under her. He wraps his arms around her in greeting, and her heart fully stops for a beat before restarting. Every glance, every smile, every gesture, they all seem like they’re tailored specifically to make her feel like the only girl in the world. She is  _ fucked _ ).

Term begins and she is forcibly yanked back into reality. NEWTs are upcoming, she’s studying to be a Curse-breaker, Lord Voldemort is on the rise, and worst of all, Sirius is now regularly making out with girls in full view of her. This is all in the first week, and when, at the end of it, the Marauders throw a small party with their seemingly-never ending stash of Firewhiskey, Ilene drinks entirely too much. Yknow, fUCK Sirius, with his dumb fucking grey eyes and his great taste in music and his strong hands and gorgeous smile fUCK all of that! FuCK Marseille and being isolated and stone architecture and fUCK everything!

So, she ends up drunkenly crawling into his bed. Normal, I’m-fine kinda shit. It probably would’ve been better if he weren’t already  _ in _ the damn bed, but it would’ve been so much worse if she hadn’t just been muttering “fuckfuckfuck” in an extraordinarily agitated tone of voice. This is of course, all relayed to her the next morning, when she wakes up with a throbbing headache in a bed that’s not hers and Sirius peering down at her, very confused, thankfully with a hangover potion in one hand. Never mind the oddly distant memory of a hand on her waist and fingers tenderly pushing hair out of her face. Never mind the whispered dream of, ‘Lenie? Hey, Lenie?’

(“Sorry. Again.”

He chuckles, “Well, they won’t be wrong when they start claiming we’ve slept together this time.”

“A week into term and that one already flying? That’ll be a record.”

“Speaking of records,” Sirius goes to rifle through his trunk, producing two vinyls still in their shrinkwrap, “if you’re free today?” He looks so happy and hopeful that it breaks her heart, and she couldn’t refuse him if she tried

“Got nothing on the docket. What did you get?”)

Amongst the records, their conversations have always shifted between light and heavy, but now it feels like a confessional as she learns more and more about him while feeling guiltier and guiltier about the way she fantasizes about his hands and his smiles when he’s gone. They meander into heavier territory as time goes by. Sometimes it’s the gossip they’ve heard in the hallways; others, it’s the impending war and a fear for the safety of their friends and her family. 

One day in late October, Sirius tells her he worries for Regulus, how his brother’s going down a dark, dark path and he has no idea how to save him. In a gesture that feels foreign but also too close, she pulls his head into her lap to play with his hair while he talks, craving his closeness. Other days, he talks excitedly about the place he bought over the summer, now that he’s an adult, thoroughly disowned, and unwilling to encroach on the Potters’ kindness any longer. On a cold November day, Ilene tentatively confesses her summer with Ellie; he doesn’t say anything rude or weird about it and promises to keep her secret. But she regrets her words, if only because she thinks she falls harder for him by his easy acceptance. 

(“So, you’re queer?” He hums without a trace of malice or salaciousness. He won’t take his eyes off the ceiling, though, curled as they are against the wall.

Silence—or as much silence as Baba O’Reilly allows— stretches between them. 

“Maybe?” She shrugged, feeling her stomach lurch with nerves. Shit, what if she’d botched it? “Hasn’t stopped me from falling in love with a bloke.” And she claps her hands over her mouth, horrified that she’d spilled that particular secret in a desperation to save face.

He whips his head around to look at her, and for a split second, she catches something across his eyes. “‘Love’? Merlin, Ilene, don’t tell me it’s someone here, we’re all tossers.”

“Do you think I have much of a social circle outside of Hogwarts?” She tries to snort, tamping down on the burgeoning hysteria she feels at her own accidental admission. 

“Just tell me it’s not Carrington? He doesn’t deserve you after last year.”

“No, thank fuck.”

Sirius looks away and doesn’t press the subject any further.)

She vacillates on whether ‘love’ is even the correct word. Most days, she thinks it’s just lust with a strong care for his feelings. ‘Love’ was a misclassification if she’d ever heard one. She’d be blind if, after the million detentions they’d shared, she hadn’t noticed how objectively and subjectively attractive he was. Lust ought to be perfectly normal. Other days? Other days when she sees him across the classroom, a brilliant smile lighting up his face at something one of his friends has said, she thinks ‘love’ is apt.

Outside of that particular slice of existential panic, she finds herself spending much more time with Remus, her stalwart Ancient Runes compatriot, especially as Lily is increasingly consumed by Head Girl duties and James’ Now Pulled-Together Act. Seventh Year Runes is worlds harder than anything they’d ever learned before and most evenings in the common room, they can be found hunched over a tome in front of the fireplace, poring over tiny differences between the Magical Sumerian scripts for “Choking” and “Tax Collector.” He’s a stellar study partner. 

(“Okay, let’s get this out of the way: you don’t fancy me, right?”

Ilene nearly spits out her chocolate frog. “What?” She coughs, “What the fuck?”

“If the answer is no, kindly tell Sirius. He seems to have gotten it into his head that you do and keeps trying to set us up.” Remus huffs, sitting delicately on the couch next to her. “He thinks he’s being subtle.”

“What, because we spend our evenings hoping to pass this fucking class and avoid getting trapped in Mesopotamian curse runes? Shock! Horror!” She massages the bridge of her nose, lying back into the couch. “Remus, I mean this with all the love in my heart, but Sirius could  _ not _ be more wrong.”

“Oh, thank Merlin.” Remus smirks at her, though she can see the relief wash over him. Then, “I thought I’d have to let you down gently. After all, I’m way out of your league.”

Ilene squawks and grabs a pillow to throw at him as they laugh.)

There’s just so much interpersonal drama and NEWT pressure going around that they can almost forget the steady stream of violence going on outside the castle bounds. Somewhere just before Christmas, Lily and James throw in the towel and  _ actually _ get together. Peter wins a cool forty galleons off the betting pool, which he then quickly reinvests in an end-of-term party for their year (featuring, of course, guests). Ilene resolves not to drink anywhere near as much as the beginning of term one. 

(“Doin’ okay there, Lenie?” Sirius almost drapes himself over her, his gait uneasy with drunkenness. The nickname makes her stomach do somersaults. “Not gonna get drunk and crawl into my bed again tonight?” Is that her imagination and the alcohol, or does he sound sad? His lips were practically against her neck, leaving goosebumps in their wake. She can’t see it, but she has no doubt that Sirius’ date is fuming from across the room. 

“I should ask the same of you, you’re sloshed.” 

“Nah, ‘m…’m good. I’ll be good, Lenie.”

Later in the night, when she presumes that she’s the only person awake, thinking about how Sirius and that Hufflepuff girl are probably still fucking on the other side of the tower, a shape bounds up onto her bed from beyond the curtains. She scrambles back into her headboard, grasping for her wand, the shape moving ever closer. Finally getting a light, a large black dog is sitting at the foot of her bed, tongue lolling and bright grey eyes sparkling. It seems friendly, moving unsteadily into her space to lick her face, and she has to stifle giggles to avoid waking up anyone else. 

She thinks she’s intoxicated, and so is the dog. 

“Oh, baby,” she coos quietly, skritching behind his ears after she pulls him off her. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you? A good boy. Who were the mean people who got you drunk? Who got a good big boy like you drunk?”

She might also be very drunk if she’s hallucinating a drunk dog, but hey. Stranger things have happened. The dog whines lowly at her, looking deeply forlorn. He puts his head down on the bed, covering its ears with its paws. 

“You wanna stay here, baby? You can stay, we’ll find your owner in the morning.” And she scratches behind his ears a couple more times, before he licks her hand and takes up residence on half of the bed. She falls asleep not long after. 

The dog isn’t there in the morning, and she’s sure she hallucinated him.)

Ilene goes along to the Evanses again for Christmas, this time after telling her Dad— who can’t really stop her, since she’s of age, but who is clearly upset about it. She sends along Lily’s home phone number so that he can call if he’s worried. 

(There’s also two-hour long-distance shouting match involved, wherein Ilene stands in a telephone booth on a street corner in Birmingham on Boxing Day, trying her damndest to make her Dad understand that she can’t go back to Marseille, she can’t isolate herself again, she wants to be with her friends, all while feeding a litany of twenty pence coins into the machine so that she can keep yelling. She knows he’s just worried about her and wants to keep her safe, but he  _ doesn’t understand! _ )

That’s the other thing, actually— Ilene wants to fight in the war. Ilene needs to fight. Her father is good at keeping his head down and keeping a low profile—hell, even after seven years of Hogwarts, he’d grown up to run a muggle shipping empire. He didn’t want to go anywhere near all of it, especially with the target on his back. Ilene, though? Half the Wizarding world still thinks she’s Grindelwald’s daughter. Even as far on as Seventh year, even as an established Gryffindor, even with her outright bored denials of the accusation, she still has first years skittering around her in terror, still has some pureblood supremacists looking at her expectantly as if they’re awaiting the day that she joins Voldemort. Everyone expects her to choose the wrong side, and she cannot abide it. Never mind that she hates the pureblood supremacist movement on principle, Ilene has  _ everything _ to prove. She  _ has _ to fight. 

She and Lily go to the Potters’ for New Years’—there’s a solid get-together of their year, and James and Lily disappear for a while (presumably to snog), and Ilene and Peter have an extended conversation about the Wimbourne Wasps’ chance of winning the League title that year (they’re both superfans, excitedly tittering about the stats and prospects of the team’s newest Beater, Ludo Bagman) and they all get steadily drunker and drunker as the night goes on, getting louder and merrier. At some point late in the evening, her conversation with Peter winds down and she finds Sirius chatting with Marlene about the new motorcycle he’d been proudly showing off to them all (whose brother’s a mechanic) and makes her way over to see how he’s doing. He’s also drunk—maybe not as bad as the end-of-term party, but still drunk—and she tries to ignore the flip-flopping her stomach does when he smiles at her, like she’s the fucking sun, and Merlin, Merlin, Merlin, she is just still, so, so  _ fucked _ . 

They delve into music—Marlene steps away by the time they start comparing Black Sabbath to Iron Maiden—and their heated debate is only interrupted by the return of a very flustered-looking James and Lily and the sudden, very belated countdown to midnight that Remus and Peter kick off from their precarious vantage point on top of the fence. Under the dim lights of the Potter’s back porch, he looks an angelic chiaroscuro, deep cheekbones cutting through the light, carefree and beautiful and laughing at her joke.

She’d be lying to herself by blaming the alcohol, but by Merlin, she tries. 

(He gapes down at her as their friends drunkenly cheer for 1978, as James dips Lily into a kiss worthy of a fairy tale. They haven’t noticed yet. Sirius’ face is still in her hands, her mouth is still just so close to his, still holding him down against her, and she realizes what she’s done. 

She does the only thing she can think to do and Apparates to the little park in the center of town that they’d seen earlier in the day, sitting numbly on the bench, staring at her lap. She’d kissed him. A New Year’s kiss and everything. Maybe fleeing to Marseille wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Maybe it wasn’t too late to transfer to Beauxbatons. She could learn enough French, couldn’t she? Dad’d welcome the move, after all. Then again, who knows how bad they’d treat her in a country where Grindelwald had actually caused real damage?

After an indeterminate amount of time passes, she hears crunching of the ground in front of her; looking up, she sees a great black dog. Great, she’s drunkenly hallucinating again. Still, she slides off the bench to her knees in front of the dog, reaching out to beckon him near. “Hullo, boy. Do you just show up when I’m sad-drunk, or are you following me?”

The dog pads forward—cautiously, with none of the reckless energy of last time—and stops just within her arms reach, sits on his hind legs, and seems to regard her for a moment. 

Then the dog is gone, replaced by Sirius (she jumps back a foot and swallows a wince when she hits the bench behind her), his eyes a strange stew of emotions, and simply says: “I think we need to talk.”

Silence. Jarred, she nods, pulling herself off the ground and back onto the bench; he sits down across from her. 

“Do you regret it?”

She wants to stomp the brakes, wants a Time Turner, wants to forget that she showed her whole ass like that. Maybe she should just try to break into the Department of Mysteries now— no one’s gonna be guarding it on New Year’s, right?

“No.” And fuck it, she’s transferring to Beauxbatons. Auf wiedersehen, fuckers-des-mères. 

“It doesn’t mean anything.” Sirius says. She distantly registers his hollow tone but remains largely consumed by her brain running at a billion miles an hour, trying to plan the last term of her seventh year in France. She’ll have to take a language course—that might be messy, though. Maybe Durmstrang? No, can’t go there, Grindelwald went there. Beauxbatons it is. She’d have to graduate a year behind her friends, but she could deal with that. “I know you’re in love with someone.”

“What.”

He blinks at her in the streetlight. “You told me—”

She thinks she might be gaping at him. 

“You—look, if you’re going to make fun of—”

“No, nonononono, that’s not what—hang on—”

“—thought I was being obvious—”

“—Sirius, I’m still getting past  _ you _ being an Animagus—"

“—and you said you might like women, but—”

“—you got drunk and crawled in my bed—” 

“So did you!”

“Because I fell in love with you and wasn’t handling it well!” And in the silence that descends over them at her exclamation, the deep-rooted panicking kicks back into gear—Department of Mysteries, Time Turner, France, French, Beauxbatons, Durmstrang, Graduation—

And Sirius is on her lips; her brain powers down.)

They talk for a long while when they come up for air, after sneaking back into the Potters’ (she and Lily are spending the night so that they don’t drink and Apparate). Hilariously enough, they’re already sharing a room—she and Lily were supposed to share James’ room while James bunked with Sirius. Of course, that was never going to be the  _ real _ sleeping arrangement at all, but now instead of Sirius and Ilene ostensibly miring in their own angst on separate sides of the room, they’re  _ happily _ sharing the bed. They don’t actually sleep, vacillating between making out and overdue conversations: Ilene’s absolute inability to understand proportionate response, Sirius’ & co.’s apparent status as an illegal Animagi, the fact that they’d been mutually pining for the better part of a year. They both look like shit when they stumble down to breakfast the next morning, but they don’t notice, too busy grinning at each other and flirting under the table to care. They think they’re subtle—they’re really not; even Mr. & Mrs. Potter notice. Remus, hungover, hands Peter, also hungover, a galleon for his troubles.

(Back in the Midlands, Lily shuffles the two of them into her room, ostensibly to unpack their overnight bags and re-pack for the imminent return to school. “Merlin, Ilene, you and  _ Sirius _ ?” She’s grinning, eyes flashing with curiosity. 

Ilene, sleep-deprived and floating, blushes uncharacteristically deep. She wonders when she stopped confiding in Lily— she never told her about Ellie or about the uncontrollable crush that consumed her lonely summer in Marseille. “It’s a saga—how much time do we have?”

Lily doesn’t hate her for any of it.)

Despite the war outside the castle gates, imminent graduation, and Ilene’s invocation of the wrath of the Mrs. Sirius Black Society, things wind down entirely too fast for any Seventh Year’s liking. After an interview that relied entirely too little on Magical Sumerian Runes for her liking—she’d prepared! So hard! and for what?  _ Nothing _ !—she’s offered a position as a Gringotts Curse-breaker; they assign her to the London office, post-graduation. James, as team captain, leads the Gryffindor Quidditch team to the Cup that year and Ilene and Sirius spend about half of the victory party making out, before disappearing to the boys’ dormitory for an extended encore. She’s happy and unburdened and untouchable. NEWTs come and go, and in the interim several days between the end of exams and the end of term, Dumbledore speaks individually with them all, asking for their support in the war against Voldemort and their discretion, even amongst their friends. Even as she’s psyched herself into it, even as she knows that she’s shown to anyone who cares to listen—to McGonagall, to Dumbledore—that she’s going to be on the right fucking side, she’s still relieved when Dumbledore asks her to fight in the nascent Order. 

(“Do refrain from mentioning this to your father, Miss Callum. He, ah—”

“He wants to keep his head down, yeah.”

Dumbledore smiles kindly over the rims of his lenses, “Not an ignoble goal, especially in these trying times. Not everyone strives to be a fighter. Not everyone ought to be.”)

Her father shows up to their graduation via portkey directly into Dumbledore’s office. He still doesn’t understand why she wants to stay and fight, but he accepts it and they don’t argue about it all day. She introduces Sirius as her boyfriend, and once her father’s eyes stop flashing (which she guesses is: protectiveness for his only daughter, shock and shrewd recognition at the Black name), they seem to get along. 

Ilene moves into Sirius’ flat in London after graduation—somewhere between training for their jobs (her Curse-breaking, his Auror-ing) and patrolling for the Order, they find time to attend some underground muggle concerts, though never too large. Things are fine for a while, and then they aren’t. They’re in duel after duel and the world soon becomes more and more claustrophobic as they lose friends and comrades. She fights Voldemort himself exactly once, and the bastard uses their duel as an attempt to recruit her once he learns her name. She laughs in his face. In the space of a year, she and Sirius and several of their friends go from schoolkids to defensive (and, as she thinks in some moments, offensive) killers. She’s definitely killed Death Eaters— probably by a hex that ruptured some internal organ— and she doesn’t know how to feel about it. She’s discomfited by how quickly she accepts that as reality, actually. 

On top of that, her friend picks the most inopportune time to get pregnant; now, she’s got a shotgun wedding to plan, too.

(“We’re making Sirius godfather—you’ll have exclusive rights to the second, I promise.” Lily laughs, and for a woman who  _ emphatically _ doesn’t want kids of her own, Ilene’s mental image of her boyfriend holding a baby makes her heart do strange things.

She grins, “It’ll be my test-godkid.”

Marriage and Kids is a conversation she and Sirius have had a couple times at this point—thankfully, they’re largely on the same page for now. Neither has any burning, pressing desire to get married, and Sirius would rather spite the Black family name to the ends of the Earth—what better way than to refuse to pass on the name? Ilene, meanwhile, hates the idea of passing on the “Grindelwald’s Spawn” stigma to anyone, so they’ve reached a consensus born of mutual trauma.)

Somehow—by some absolute fucking miracle, by an intercession of both Morgana and Merlin (and partially Henry, who negotiates superb caterers  _ from Marseille _ ), in the middle of a fucking war— they manage to organize and execute the wedding at Lily’s 5-month mark and no later. No bloated whale look for her best friend, no siree, not if Ilene Elspeth Callum has any-fucking-thing to say about it.

(“I hear,” and she can see the shiver run through Sirius’ whole body at the sultry tone she’s adopted, “the Maid of Honor and the Best Man generally leave together.”

“Oh really?” He’s going for cool, but she can see he’s straining to maintain his composure. “I don’t know how my girlfriend would feel about that.”

She leans in; to any onlookers, it would look like she was merely whispering an aside. Between her long and his shoulder-length hair, though, she has enough cover to tug his earlobe lightly, briefly, between her teeth, savoring the slight hitch in his breath. “I’m sure you can bend the rules.”

She pulls back with a smirk and goes to dote on Lily, elsewhere on the Potters’ back lawn. Later, after the happy couple has left and the caterers have proven themselves self-sufficient, they Apparate home and he corners her against the inside of the door. “Lenie, you tease.” He hisses between nipping furiously down her neck.

“You expect me not—ah—not to, when you—ah, mmm—look this good?”)

Despite maturing and graduating and now about to be a father, James is still a dumbass; when Sirius tells her about the motorcycle-and-police incident hours after the fact, Ilene can’t help her brain’s immediate response: formulating an explosive jail break to spring the two of them from the holding cell, even though clearly neither were actually arrested. She tells Sirius, who laughs that he’d appreciate that kind of rescue if he’s ever captured. 

The world spirals darker and darker—they’re all keeping secrets from each other, Ilene knows. James and Lily and the impending baby are the only light in the endless tunnel. Remus disappears for months at a time, looking thinner every time she sees him—she plies him with bone broth every time he shows up at the flat even as he remains tight-lipped. Peter says his mother is ill (that’s an alibi, but it’s clearly for some kind of mission), Marlene is sprinting all over the country and clearly losing sleep. Sirius’ Auror training seems to get more intense. She thinks she hears him mutter _ Crucio _ in his sleep, even as he clutches her tighter. 

Ilene doesn’t think she has much of a leg to stand on, though. There’s a full 96 hours that had disappeared from her memory in the early summer of 1979 that drove her into a complete panic— Sirius was away on a mission with James that week, so she has no idea what happened to those days. None of her neighbors saw anyone strange come into the apartment, only ever she and Sirius. She debates putting up muggle surveillance cameras outside their flat, starts journaling thereafter, but it never happens again, and she’s genuinely too scared to know what she might’ve done, what she might’ve proved to the world about why she ought not have been trusted in the first place. The anxiety eats her up for weeks until she pukes so viciously that Sirius gets genuinely concerned that  _ she _ might be up the spout. She can’t tell him, so she lets him coo and dote on her and acquire a test that, of course, comes back negative. 

(“If you were, y’know,” and Sirius gestures vaguely, “I know we—I’d make you honest.”

‘Honest’ is not a word that describes Ilene right now—doesn’t describe any of them, actually—but she pushes the guilt deep, deep down and sighs from her spot in his lap. “Which shitty last name would it get, Sirius? The one associated with dark wizards, or the one associated with different dark wizards?”)

But the world doesn’t collapse, nor do Aurors descend upon her in the dead of night, nor do Lily and James and Sirius and Remus and Peter and Marlene and Dumbledore regard her with repulsion. It just stays as terrible as it ever was. She doesn’t tell anyone. She stores the guilt away, lets it marinate. 

Lily and James’ kid is adorable in the way that all loud, squishy things are. She hesitates to call Lily ‘radiant’—mostly she just looks exhausted, but by Merlin does Lily look like she’s seen the face of God. She thinks that something visibly softens in James as baby Harry reaches out with one tiny, fat hand and wraps it around his father’s extended index finger. Sirius, too, looks thrilled to be his godparent; it almost makes her wish she  _ had _ been pregnant. 

(She’s not entirely sure how she ends up here a week after Lily gives birth, but here she is: standing outside a cell in Azkaban, brilliant white dog circling her feet, watching Elspeth Callum mcfreakin’ lose it.

The other woman sees her and flings herself against the bars, shouting incoherencies and bile, hissing over and over again, “Filthy mudblood stole my baby! My baby girl!”

She doesn’t know how long she stands there, soaking it in, but the Patronus at her feet never ceases her watch.

She doesn’t go to the cremation ceremony a month later when Elspeth dies. Her dad does. She takes the deeds and titles and shoves them into a safe in her dad’s house in Marseille.)

Ilene and Sirius play loving godparents well, showering Harry in gifts as if to make up for the fact that they’re both increasingly slipping into this war. Dumbledore’s got her (ab)using her position to keep an eye on flows of funds to families thought to support Voldemort. And Gringotts, far from taking sides, has long-since taken all its British Curse-breakers out of exploratory functions, instead reassigning them to reverse-engineer curses to protect its assets. She pores over dark, dark tomes and banned books, absorbing foul rituals dark enough to make her stomach turn, and blood runes that hadn’t been used since the days of the Founders. She finds herself reflexively using one to kill two Death Eaters who’d caught her off-guard and backed her into a corner. She’s horrified by how easily it comes to her fingertips, how quickly it worked. She removes one of their masks—she’d dated Elden Henson in fourth year. 

(Sirius wordlessly goes out for another pregnancy test when he finds her once again at the porcelain altar. It is, once again, negative.)

Something changes— somehow, they all lose the upper hand. There must be a spy in the Order. Marlene and her family are found massacred; Caradoc Dearborn disappears altogether; Dorcas Meadowes is hauled before Voldemort and executed with her head held high; Sirius starts getting frantic letters from his cousin Narcissa, begging him to send her any news he might have of Regulus (who hasn’t been seen in years); Ilene is the one to find Benjy Fenwick splattered across the walls. And in all of that, they find out: James and Lily are next on the kill list. 

Barring the Potters, no one is wholly immune from suspicion as the spy, not even their friends. Remus hasn’t been seen in months and won’t tell anyone where he is; Peter’s muggle mother can’t have been sick this whole time, can she?; Sirius still mutters Unforgiveables in his sleep; and she herself, she’d lost four whole days. 

The two of them fight, too, cutting words and backhanded comments and snide insinuations and loud tempers that they try to forget as they fall into bed together afterwards. They’ve each stormed out of the flat on various occasions, returning in the dead of night reeking of a distillery, crawling into the other’s arms regardless. She loves him so much, so much that it wrecks her, rips her insides to shreds at the thought that either of them could be the spy.

It’s hard to see the Potters in person, as they flit from place to place. Both James and Lily are clearly climbing the walls, even as they focus on Harry and their collective safety. It gets to the point where Dumbledore suggests the Fidelius Charm to protect them. They take Sirius as Secret-Keeper. 

And on November 1, she gets the news as she rustles awake to an empty bed, to Remus frantically, tearfully banging on the door— James and Lily and Peter are dead. Sirius was the traitor. Harry still lives and Voldemort is gone. The war is over.

After that, it’s a blur of tears and of Aurors sweeping the flat, looking for Dark objects. Remus, bless him, doesn’t leave her side the entire time, though she thinks that as much for his benefit as it is hers—his emotions appear to be as jumbled. She’s interrogated extremely hostilely— the Auror running the operation recognizes her last name— until Dumbledore sweeps through the door, collecting her and Remus and whisking them back to his office Hogwarts and letting them sit by themselves for a while. Her father arrives not too long after by Portkey, and if she’d thought she had outgrown crying to her dad, she’s clearly wrong. 

Neither she nor Remus can handle the funeral— the prevalence of the Killing Curse has horrifyingly led to a prevalence of open-casket funerals. She can’t stomach seeing Lily and James, unscathed but unnervingly still. At least they’re not macabre enough to attempt the same for Peter’s finger— that, they keep in a closed box. She ducks out half-way through, and Remus finds her sobbing in a closet in the nearby church. He looks just as bad as she feels, and she scoots over so that he can sit next to her while he shatters.

She puts in bereavement leave notice to Gringotts and takes her father up on the offer of a couple weeks in France to recover. Remus goes with, because they’re not willing to let the other alone at this time. They’re all they have left. 

(“There are four days that I can’t remember. I thought I might’ve been the spy and not known it.” She admits, voice hollow, over a glass of scotch. “Now I think that Black might’ve done it to me.”) 

She thinks about her mother in Azkaban— in twenty years, will that also be Sirius, muttering and insane?

(She really wants everything she’s felt for him to morph to hate, for all the love that she’d had for him to desiccate and crumble to ash, but she misses him. She misses his arms and his smile— she misses how he felt, how happy he made her. She doesn’t miss him enough to forgive him, though.)

They go back to England. Both individually and together, she and Remus attempt to get custody of Harry. Each time, they’re denied. Anti-werewolf sentiment and legislation brought on in the aftermath of the war make it impossible for Remus to adopt, and Ilene had been godmother in-name-only— Black had been given the legal designation. Waving around his name certainly wouldn't endear her to the bureaucrats. None of this is helped by the fact that the wizards and witches manning the registries—who, like many bureaucrats, seem to be on the older side—recognize and loathe her on sight for her name and the purported association to Grindelwald. 

(She nearly breaks down in front of the wizard on duty one day, remembering suddenly that Lily had wanted more kids, that she would’ve  _ actually _ been godmother.)

Remus goes travelling after months of the two of them essentially on top of each other with grief; with few other options beyond ‘shrivel up and die from emotions’, Ilene throws herself into work. She takes a transfer to the Rome field office on the strength of her Phoenician runic and dives in. She learns Italian; she finds new friends amongst her coworkers who know nothing about her connection to the fight against the British Dark Wizards, who don’t know that she’s trying to move desperately from the cataclysm of 1981. She meets an Italian man in a muggle Goth club—bulked and kind but paradoxically spoiling for a fight. Try as he might to pick her up, she doesn’t let him. They end up on the same side of a barfight in a dive bar a week later, though.

(“Well, shit.” Except her words are muffled by the frozen peas she’s holding to her nose, so she takes them off for emphasis. “You did get me back to yours, after all.”

“Sorry, didn’t think it’d be like  _ this _ .” Sébastiane—Bash, as she’ll ultimately end up calling him—has produced a whole shrink-wrapped raw steak from the freezer, pressing it to the bruise flowering across his skin. His knuckles are black and blue. “You handle yourself well in a fight, Lenie.” His tone is gentle and his English measured, a far cry from the man who’d been whaling on a stranger with the business end of a barstool a mere half hour ago, face contorted with rage and anguish. 

“Don’t call me that.” She snaps reflexively, her own split knuckles flexing subconsciously. It makes her hiss quietly in pain. Bash doesn’t notice, flashes a smile and tries to wink, then winces. Ilene snorts despite herself, then regrets it. She presses the slowly-thawing peas back to her nose.)

Bash becomes her closest friend in Rome. He is also, as it turns out, a werewolf. For all his brash, loud nature, he goes oddly quiet when he sees her wand in her handbag; for two months, he’d been operating under the assumption that she was a Muggle. His coming out is after weeks of gradually distancing himself from her, their conversations becoming less and less substantial, until she borderline tracks him down and demands to know what he’s doing by ditching her. Werewolf rights in Italy are in a sorry state, with lycanthropes stripped of their wands and barred from most social services; it was why Bash had been fired from his job as a solicitor only half a year ago. Ilene’s blood boils—she thinks of Remus, safe in England, now of Bash, and is spitting chips on his behalf by the end of the explanation.

(She has felt the eyes boring into her soul all night, from all over the room. Her grandmother’s etiquette training had not prepared her to be the only non-lycanthrope in the room in a country deeply hostile to werewolves. This is all, of course, exacerbated by the fact that her Italian is only passable; while Bash speaks English and has been helping her, apparently most occupants of the room won’t even say ‘hello’ in English. This is fine only until Ilene wants to discuss anything more substantial than small talk. 

«  _ Qual—qual sono, uh, vostre opinioni sulle nuovo riforme del—d…del-- ?  _ » Shit, okay, uh, she’s forgotten the word. «  _ Travalo ? Laboro ? _ » The raised eyebrows she gets in response are NOT helpful, thank you very much. Across the room, Bash is deep in discussion with a pretty girl, brow furrowed and gesticulating wildly, so there goes  _ that _ life raft. He’d said he was the newest to their pack and Ilene wasn’t going to scuttle his integration if she could help it.

Well, any more than she already is.

  
“Are you trying to discuss labor reforms in a language you only half-speak?” An English-speaking voice practically slices through the audio fuzz. “You’re looking for “ _ Lavoro _ .” The woman’s Italian accent wraps beautifully through the Received pronunciation in her words and Ilene could cry with relief. 

Her two conversational companions practically flee to more Italian waters, so she turns to thank her linguistic savior, and her mouth goes dry. 

The woman in front of her is probably a head taller, long dark hair cascading down one side of her head, the other shaved in an undercut. Her eyes—not brown, she catalogues, but  _ sienna _ —glitter mischievously, and Ilene finds her eyes drawn to the lip ring on the lower right of the woman’s blood-red lips. She’s a countercultural goddess, ripped straight from the pagan annals and liberally seasoned with revolution and modernity. 

“Holy shit,” Ilene breathes; then remembering herself, tries to play it off. “You, uh, you saved me there.”

_ Smooth. _

“You looked like you needed help.” The nameless woman smirks, sharp teeth catching on the edge of her lip by its piercing. Ilene tries not to go weak at the knees. “What’s a pretty foreign witch doing, trying to discuss Italian Magical Labor laws in a room full of werewolves?” The glimmer in her eyes is bordering on dangerous; whether she wants to verbally tear Ilene to shreds for any possible Bad Takes, literally flay her alive, or tear her clothes off where they stand? Ilene hasn’t figured that out quite yet, but she  _ really _ hopes it’s the latter. She might not even mind the other two, actually.

Either way, she very deliberately ignores that the most beautiful woman she’s  _ ever  _ set eyes upon just called her ‘pretty,’ before nosediving right into her Strong Opinions about the minutiae of anti-lycanthrope housing legislation in Britain.)

Offering a late-night cappuccino back in her apartment is possibly Ilene’s best decision to-date. Alessandra is whip-smart and fearless and soon one date spirals into two, into ten, and before she knows it, they’ve moved in together. The werewolves traipse in and out of their living space, crashing on their couch when they find themselves out of work; buoyed by both Bash and Alé’s faith and trust in her, they warm to Ilene, kindly correcting her Italian and ribbing the pair for their public displays of affection. 

(She’s also deeply, privately amused that bold, assertive, aggressive Alessandra Battiston is both the Alpha of the Roman pack and a bottom. The Duality of Woman.)

The four years they are together are not perfect—Ilene tries desperately not to become an alcoholic, and Alessandra’s wealthy parents disown her (a werewolf and well-known activist, they could tolerate, but  _ una lesbica _ ? Apparently not)—but they are happy. She loves her girlfriend on her own terms—not as a replacement for Black, not as a salve for the hole he ripped into her heart and life, but as a clean slate. She follows Alé to protests—her girlfriend insists that as a foreigner, she hide her face from view at rallies—and bails her and others out when things go south. 

When even-more restrictive legislation is passed, when the local Ministries start talking about imprisoning werewolves merely for existing, Ilene is the only non-werewolf in the room as the pack forms the Fronte di Liberazione del Lupi Mannari. She helps them purchase muggle supplies for their operations. She uses herself as bait to save a transformed Bash, who is nearly tricked into slaughtering nearby muggles (Alé doesn’t let her out of her sight for a week after that, and neither can tell who’s most shaken out of the three of them). She begins looking into becoming an Animagus; she keeps that research a secret, hoping to surprise them one day. 

It all comes crashing down when Alessandra’s enemies order a hit on her, when the Roman streets themselves seem to mock her for Alé’s sudden absence. Ilene is twenty-seven and has been to at least four times as many funerals for friends and lovers as she has weddings.

(“You’re going to be okay?” Bash murmurs into her neck at the portkey station, squeezing her tightly. Everything had coincided with her Gringotts year-end, and she’d declined to renew her work visa. Italy hurt. 

They’re both definitely under surveillance, but she thinks they’re probably fine. She’d taken her revenge the muggle way, without the slightest evidence that any magic had been used in that room. That Camorristi had had one foot in each world. And so it goes.

“Take care of yourself, Bash.” She says instead. “Take care of the others.”

He doesn’t answer either.)

She transfers back to London by way of Marseille, and instead of returning to the old apartment so littered with memories of her and Sirius and of grief and sorrow, she takes up the Callum mantle. She moves into the estate out in Great Cheverell, methodically cleaning out the abandoned house with occasional help from her Dad or Remus. She resells all the jewelry (and several Dark artifacts) barring one—a large gold ring with inset rubies that makes her think of the best of her school days. In a move intended to be wholly sacrilegious to its former occupants, she remodels—by hand, the Muggle way—a number of rooms and halls to fit bigger windows and allow as much sunlight to filter in as possible. She builds a pool in the expansive backyard and goes to the trouble of mowing the lawn by herself on weekends. She stops calling it Callum Manor—it’s  _ Callum’s _ Manor now. It’s hers alone.

(Their—now only hers—combined record collection gets a room to itself because she needs more purposes for all these rooms, and also because she needs to be able to lock the memories away for stretches of time. Sometimes she’ll sit in the room for hours, listening to  _ Queen I _ ’s “Liar” on repeat. He’d always loved it, the bastard.)

She gets a handful of invites to Society functions and declines all of them, choosing instead to show up on the floor of Wizengamot to lobby for expanded Being rights with her free time. She is firmly the bane of the existence of a fair number of conservative purebloods, though she takes great care not to fully alienate Minister Fudge. She regularly gets tea with Tyla Nott, who’d been her Potions partner for seven years, and is both quietly sympathetic to Ilene and a complete chaotic neutral, thriving on Society gossip and tears. 

With all the unused rooms in her house, she opens her home to Remus, who finds himself often kicked out of wizarding dwellings for lycanthropy, and out of muggle dwellings for lack of income. He protests, as she knows he would, but she does her level best to emphasize that he can always crash with her—and in fact,  _ please, I’m begging you, I’m so alone out here, my nearest neighbor is like a fucking hour’s walk away _ . 

(There’s a short, 48-hour period in which Remus and Ilene attempt to Be A Thing. Mutual trauma and a long-standing friendship are a fair basis for any kind of relationship, right? The answer is, of course, ‘no;’ it’s further derailed when Remus spots her FLLM tattoo on her upper thigh. They laugh later at their delusion; she loves him, and he loves her, but never romantically.

Remus’ transformations are difficult—he says he’d started relying so heavily on the other Marauders to ease the loss of his mind that without them, it’s an extra wound. She’s not superb at Potions and could too-easily botch the still-new Wolfsbane; so, she sets back on the process she’d began in Rome: becoming an Animagus. She’s not as talented as James or Black at transfiguration, but she goes through the legal channels and talks McGonagall into supporting her endeavor. It takes three years of extraordinarily hard work, but the satisfaction of transforming, of knowing that one of her only remaining friends won’t be alone in his worst moments, is worth it all in the end. 

Also, a lioness? Cool.)

She wants to believe that time’s passage really does heal her wounds—as people age, many forget Grindelwald. Voldemort was the more recent threat, and soon “Callum” is associated less with Dark witches and Grindelwald the Terrible, and more with ‘that muckraking bitch’ (as Tyla’s asshole husband reportedly calls her) lobbying for Nonhuman Rights legislation. But the biggest revelation doesn’t happen until June of 1993, when Ilene gets stabbed in the brain on a crisp Friday evening.

Metaphorically, of course, but it rips a scream from her lungs all the same, as her brain gets suddenly jostled and slammed and just as it all starts making sense again, everything goes dark. 

She wakes on the floor, alone, feeling like she’s sprinted across London carrying a whole hippogriff. But the sense of ballooning satisfaction with herself—that she knows what happened during those Four Days, that she never betrayed anyone—gives her the energy to drag herself across her house to the medicine cabinet, slam down two Pepper-Up Potions, and grab her handbag and passport.

(Ilene’s broken every speed limit in both countries by driving all night, but that’s nothing a disillusionment charm hasn’t fixed any time she neared a cop car. Admittedly, that’s the only magic she’s willing to do—if he wants to stay off the grid, she’s going to respect that until she gets the answers she needs. Besides—what’s the point of learning to drive in Italy if you can’t use those hard-won skills?

When she pulls up to the mansion in the middle of nowhere, her legs have cramped and she  _ really _ needs to pee, but waits patiently on the hood of the car in the midmorning sun. 

_ “You could’ve at least had the good manners to call ahead _ .” Great, are they doing this in French? For fuck’s sake, it was bad enough when she had to exchange pleasantries at the border. 

“ _ I only remembered last night. Hey, do you mind if I use the toilet first? The one on the ferry was the worst.” _

“…Never speak French again. Your accent is atrocious.” Regulus Black, looking extraordinarily hale for a dead man, stands aside and lets her power walk past him into the house.)

The Quadrigot was a Phoenecian blood runic ritual, created to seal memories in lengths denominated by fours far and away from even the most prying and skilled of Legilimens—four minutes, fourteen hours, forty days, all combinations thereby. Ilene had stumbled across it while knee-deep in her research for Gringotts back during the War. It had been thus what she turned to when she’d pulled her then-boyfriend’s brother out of a lake of Inferi, having been press-ganged into surprise service by the world’s saggiest house-elf to save a man looking to steal a fragment of a fascist megalomaniac’s soul. 

If the unearthed memories weren’t still playing on repeat in her head, she’d have trouble buying it too. 

(Regulus hums, musing, “It’s fortuitous, that when I came to say goodbye, he wasn’t there.”

“Yep, and now you’re stuck with me instead. A toast to you, the unsung hero who vanquished the bastard at last. It’ll take some of the pressure off my godkid.” She waves her teacup in his general direction. 

“Depends, I’m sure, on his appetite for fame. Does he take after his mother or father in temperament?”

She feels her mood sour. “Dunno. Your brother was the one on the official paperwork. Combine that with Adora Callum’s unkillable rumor mill, and—”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

After a few minutes of silence, he adds: “I would never have believed Sirius could go Dark. Not if it had not happened.”

“Join the fuckin’ club.”)

Regulus is content to live out his life in anonymity in rural France, the world none the wiser. Final mystery solved; she breathes easier. Ilene has pulled herself back together with her new preoccupations, piece by piece, all for it to only shatter, shards escaping her grip. 

A month after her escapade to the outskirts of Saint-Benoît-du-Sault, Sirius Black escapes from Azkaban.

Aurors show up at her estate, searching for clues (and, perhaps, accusations). Rita Skeeter appears on her lawn, sniffing for a statement. Ilene had been publicly pestering the Wizengamot at the time of his escape, so they all leave empty-handed (it takes extraordinary willpower not to maul Skeeter in particular, after the libelous anti-werewolf article that woman had published a month prior). Auror Shacklebolt tells her that Black appears to have retained his sanity, despite twelve years in that hellhole.

(A part of her, buried deep under the years, rejoices that he’s still himself. The part of her that still loves him wants to turn over every stone to find him, to demand answers, to know from the horse’s proverbial mouth  _ why _ , to understand  _ why _ , to know how much of the man she knew had been a lie. Had he ever actually loved her? Had he loved  _ any _ of them?)

(She wonders if she ought to tell Regulus that he’s escaped. She decides against it.)

Shortly afterward, Dumbledore offers Remus a job as Defense professor. Despite the fact that everyone believes the job is jinxed, Remus takes it. Harry—little Harry—will be a third year at Hogwarts this year, and while the headmaster doesn’t say anything of the sort, they both think it: Harry is in danger. 

Remus sets off in September, determined to get a glimpse of the kid on the Hogwarts Express before term begins; he sends updates over the subsequent weeks. That Harry is the spitting image of James with Lily’s eyes, somehow both doesn’t surprise her and simultaneously delivers an emotional sucker punch of extraordinary strength.

(She’s nervous to meet the kid again. She could’ve fought harder for custody. She could’ve fought to ask Lily and James to put her in the will. She could’ve stolen a Time Turner and changed her last name years ago. Did Petunia talk about Lily’s friends? What must he think of her?)

In October, her supervisor calls her into a meeting. In the process of drowning her trauma in work, she had completely neglected to take any vacation at all in the last  _ six years _ . In an effort to both boost morale amongst her direct reports (who have apparently become very reluctant to take  _ any _ vacation) and to comply with recently revised Wizard-Goblin labor laws, Gringotts ‘asks’ her to take a paid year-long sabbatical, starting in January. She accepts it because she wants to keep her job, but now she’s got nothing to do for the next  _ year _ , except follow the Daily Prophet’s ‘Hunt for Sirius Black’ column with increasing amounts of red string and caffeine. 

Ilene complains to Remus about it in one of her letters, and sometime in mid-December, Dumbledore asks her to come up to Hogwarts. She swings by Remus’ office first; he’s speaking to a student. Her friend beckons her to enter and the student turns to look at her—she can tell before the kid introduces himself that it’s Harry. Remus’ descriptions were bang-on. There’s no spark of recognition in his eyes when she introduces herself, so she merely describes herself as “an old friend of Remus’,” before excusing herself to visit the headmaster. 

Dumbledore tells her that the Ancient Runes teacher, Professor Babbling, has unfortunately experienced a family emergency that may make her unable to teach the latter half of the term. Given Ilene’s experience in the field of Runes and sudden free time, would she be so kind as to temporarily take the post?

(She quirks an eyebrow, “That’s not the reason you want me here, though.” 

“You misunderstand me, Ilene,” Dumbledore leans back in his seat. “Bathsheda has previously worked diligently through other family emergencies for lack of a suitable short-term replacement, but I fear this one may require her undivided attention. Your knowledge of Ancient Runes is extensive enough to teach her classes, with the aid of her notes, of course. But—” and here, his eyes lose their kindly twinkle, “—I will not deny the merits of having professors highly-motivated to capture Black. He has already broken in once—who better to stop him in future than two of the people who knew him best?”

“I don’t think I knew him at all.”

“That may be. But my offer is genuine.”)

Well, it’s not like she’s got anything better to do for the year.

She spends the rest of December reading all the Ancient Runes texts required at each level, comparing them to Babbling’s extraordinarily detailed lesson plans and notes, and resurfaces for exactly long enough to visit her Dad and Grandma for Christmas. Come January 2 nd and she’s seated at the High Table next to Remus, feeling very strange about being on this end of the room for once. Dumbledore explains away her presence to the school at large, and she waves, feeling slightly flighty. 

There aren’t any complaints from parents about Ilene Elspeth Callum teaching their children—always good, always great for her morale— though there is a third-year Gryffindor student who seems to scrutinize her from her spot in the front row. She’s a curious, smart kid— Ilene wonders if she’s stumbled across her mother’s name in a history book. 

They make it to exams with only two incidents. Black breaks into the Castle. It’s an unqualified nightmare—one of Molly Weasley’s kids wakes to find Black standing over him with a knife,  _ in Gryffindor Tower.  _ Clearly, Black has absolutely lost it. Everyone makes it out of that fright unscathed, but they’ve still got a mass murderer on the loose. 

(For weeks after, her dreams are haunted by Sirius, deranged, with a knife, laughing at her when she begs for answers.)

The second incident, though, is far more important: Remus gets the Marauders’ Map back. She’d completely forgotten about it, hadn’t seen that thing since late seventh year. Of all people, apparently, he’d confiscated it from Harry, who was allegedly sneaking out to Hogsmeade in one of the most James-esque turns of fate ever. 

(“He’s got James’ sense of adventure, but you should hear him— it’s Lily’s wit.”

“I’m sorry, I’m still getting past you, as a teacher, being the one to confiscate the Map. Is this not the height of irony? Aren’t James and Peter laughing at you?”) 

The Map is the best weapon they could’ve been handed. They trade it back and forth, searching for any hint of Black on the periphery or in the passages. She doesn’t know yet how she’ll react if their search isn’t futile. She thinks she’ll kill him.

Exams end and Hogwarts collectively decompresses--with the full moon later that night, Ilene swans into Remus’ office, expecting to collect the Map for her shift. He’s not there; the Map is, it’s active, and Black, Peter Pettigrew, and Ron Weasley are flying off the map to the Shrieking Shack, while Hermione Granger and Harry are hot on their heels. Running to the castle entrance, presumably to follow them, she sees Remus. 

She almost doesn’t notice Snape enter the room with the goblet of Wolfsbane. Thankfully, she wipes the Map—Pettigrew, Pettigrew, Pettigrew— before he gets to the desk. 

She thanks her former friend (friend? No, he was always Lily’s friend, not hers) for the potion on Remus’ behalf and sends him on his way. When he’s left the room, she reactivates the Map to make sure that he’s actually gone, transfers the potion into a Conjured vial, takes both it and the Map, and sprints for the Willow.

(Pettigrew Pettigrew Pettigrew Pettigrew)

A distant memory: “The Map can’t lie, Lenie— it’s a Homounculous Charm, it’s built around a distinct magical signature that can’t be masked, not even by Polyjuice.”

(Pettigrew Pettigrew Pettigrew Pettigrew)

A theory begins developing, something wilder and more red-string-conspiracy theory than anything she could’ve thought possible, something that feels dangerously like hope. 

(There’s shouting from upstairs in the Shack, adolescent voices and angry, desperate voices and she takes the crumbling stairs two at a time, desperate to intercede, desperate to get answers. She casts  _ Expelliarmus _ at the first wand she sees—Remus’— and barrels through the doorway, demanding of the room “Someone start explaining, stat.”

Behind him, a pleading voice croaks, “It was the rat, Lenie.” And Black— her Sirius, who looks manic but not crazed, only malnourished and skeletal and wow isn’t that worse— raises a finger toward the Weasley kid, who’s grasping a furiously wiggling pet rat. “We didn’t tell anyone when we switched.” 

It makes sense, in that wild way. Peter as the Secret Keeper, not Sirius— James and Sirius had been closer than brothers. Peter had been their friend, but nowhere as close. And no one would seriously suspect Peter of being a Death Eater, what with his Muggle mother—not compared to Sirius Black, when Regulus had been a Death Eater, whose cousins were prominently wrapped up in the Dark either through volition or marriage. It would be so easy to hide as an unregistered rat Animagus— say, as a pet. A pet rat that’s visibly missing a toe. A pet rat who presumably would have slept in its owners’ bed in Gryffindor Tower.

(Pettigrew Pettigrew Pettigrew Pettigrew)

There are other things she needs answered, but she nods, trying to ignore the blossoming hope in her chest, the way it wants to spill out and over, the way that her stomach starts flopping again when he smiles at her, elated— it’s not the same, but it also is— the way he makes to move across the room as if to embrace her. “All we need is a body, then.”

The children squawk in outrage, and Remus joins in, “They have the right to know, Ilene! Just wait!”

“I’ve waited twelve years!” Sirius roars, “In Azkaban!”

“And twenty more minutes won’t kill the both of you.”

She hands Remus the vial and his wand, “I’ll kill  _ you _ if you don’t drink this right now.” Her tone is light.) 

They piece the narrative together over the course of telling it. The kids, now on-board, hand over the rat. With a simple spell, she’s staring down Peter once more as he grovels for mercy from them all. 

(“Ilene, please, you can stop them, don’t let them kill me!”

She can’t believe this wailing, simpering man is all that’s left of Peter, who shared her gusto for the Wasps, whose betting skills were second-to-none, who could dole out witty comebacks without a second thought, who had been a loyal, brave kid, once upon a time. What had  _ happened _ during the war when they weren’t looking?

She’d gone to his funeral, she’d mourned him along with James and Lily, and here he was, the reason they were dead, the reason Sirius had gone to Azkaban, the reason she and Remus had had their own spiraling mental breaks, the reason Harry had grown up without parents or godparents.

“Not to worry, Peter.” she hums in the breeziest tone she can muster, placing the tip of her wand right to his jugular, “I’ll kill you myself.”)

Harry intercedes in James’ name— they won’t kill Pettigrew, but truss him up and hand him over to the dementors. 

(“This is all fine and good, but Remus isn’t going anywhere tonight,” Ilene reminds them. “It’s a full moon.” The kids jump back a foot, while Sirius moves to stand between her and Remus. “The potion will keep him harmless, but it’s not going to help our cause if we walk up to the Minister with a convict, a dead man, and a werewolf. That’s the opening to a joke, and the punchline is that we all end up imprisoned or Kissed.” She can feel her Politics Brain re-engaging after months of disuse. “Sirius, stay here with Remus— I’ll take the kids and the rat up to the castle. If we can establish Pettigrew’s guilt first, then it’ll be easier to secure your freedom.”)

Sirius still walks them to the mouth of the passage below the Willow. They speak briefly before he bounds up to Harry, who probably doesn’t even remember him—who might not even know he has a godfather.

(“I’ve got a plan, I promise.”

“Is this a good plan, or a wild one?” There’s a glitter of the pre-Azkaban Sirius in his words and though his face is sunken and thin, his crooked smile coaxes one out of her. 

Suddenly, she’s eighteen again, cocky and unburdened and in love, “Have a little faith, babe.” She goes to peck him on the cheek, but he pulls her into him, holding her like he used to even though now she can feel every single one of his ribs individually. 

“I missed you, Lenie.”

Her stomach lurches— long ago and far away, she’d promised him a jailbreak. Instead she’d just left him to rot. She doesn’t deserve him anymore.)

To his credit, Dumbledore takes Pettigrew’s presence absolutely stellarly, bundling off the three teenagers to the Hospital Wing— she can see Harry trying desperately to catch her eye— and taking the Animagus to his office, where the Minister is. Ilene puts the second part of her plan into play: she’s about to burn a(n admittedly shaky and probably half-broken) bridge.

She sprints to the dungeons and, finding Snape grading exams, proclaims that they’ve caught Lily’s killer, and that they need Veritaserum, stat. Of course, Snape is going to fill in the blanks and think it’s Sirius, and she lets him.

He fully fumes, glaring daggers when they get to the office and he doesn’t see Sirius, only a trussed-up pudgy man— but the Minister is there, and Snape dutifully administers the potion. The admissions that follow are everything they need to clear Sirius’ name, and by the end of it, Fudge has taken a seat, looking bowled over and worrying the brim of his lime green bowler hat between his fingers. Snape turns on his heel and flees the room at the first chance, but not without a glare that could shatter glass, which he directs at her. Dumbledore looks mildly sick. 

Time for Stage Three.

(“Well,” she speaks into the silence, affecting a shocked tone that’s only partially pretend, “the Ministry threw an innocent man in jail.”

Fudge snaps to attention immediately, tensing up. “Now, Miss Callum—“

“I’m not blaming  _ you _ , Minister. It would’ve been the Bagnold Ministry that left you this mess.” She watches him relax slightly before continuing, “Actually, they might have inadvertently given you a gift. Bringing this scum—“ she gestures to Pettigrew, who has been Stunned, “—to justice and clearing Black’s name sounds like a great path to re-election. Make a public trial, make a spectacle of it.”

Dumbledore is watching Ilene sharply; Fudge is too, but she can see the gears grinding in his mind. The current Minister is almost laughably easy to manipulate when it comes to electoral victory. He loves his job, loves the esteem that it holds him in, and has an election upcoming in a year and a half. If he can use the revelation to position himself as a crusader for justice (especially in contrast to Bagnold, who’d been part of the opposition), he’ll fight to have Sirius cleared.

The Minister leaves shortly thereafter with a grin on his face and an Auror dragging Pettigrew to jail. He offers her an Order of Merlin for her efforts, which she demurs— she doesn’t deserve it. 

“Ilene,” Dumbledore says, “I’m sure there’s more than what Pettigrew has admitted.”

She fills him in on everything else.)

Her first stop after Dumbledore’s Office is the kitchen, acquiring a triple shot of espresso; then, she checks on the kids, all hunched over Ron’s bed in the Hospital Wing, whispering in an undertone. 

(“Professor Callum, what happens if Black isn’t exonerated?” Hermione asks, voice small. 

Ilene grimaces, “Better I don’t tell you. You get plausible deniability that way, in case I have to do something stupid.” And if she  _ has _ to  _ kill  _ Fudge to get Sirius cleared, well, she’ll ask Bash to help her with that. 

Almost surprisingly— though maybe not, after this rollercoaster of a night— none of them look especially concerned by her words.

“Well, at least it wasn’t You-Know-Who again this year.” Ron says, with the air of someone who’s been in this spot too many times before.

“What.”)

Her trip to the Hospital Wing lasts so much longer than anticipated as the trio fill her in on the last two years’ worth of attempts by You-Know-Who to resurrect and kill Harry (“There was a  _ what _ in the  _ WHERE?!? _ ”— the Chamber of Secrets in particular tingles all of her Curse-breaker senses, and the cursed diary sounds  _ uncomfortably _ akin to Regulus’ description of the locket, and she feels her stomach sinking into her toenails at the thought) and she thinks that Ron gets a kick out of seeing a teacher suffer a full BSOD (“How do you not have Orders of Merlin by this point? How the fuck are you all still  _ alive?!? _ ”). To think this has been one of the less-eventful years for these three kids is baffling, and they seem to be handling it entirely too well. She’s horrified, but also impressed. 

Eventually, probably somewhere around 1am, she does get out to the Shack, transforming once she’s past the mouth of the passage and sprinting. The wolf is where they left him, easily sharing his space with the dog for the first time in a decade, possibly calmly for the first time—and even Padfoot’s so thin, she registers, even as the dog stands to put himself between her and Moony, questioning her presence. The wolf recognizes her, though, crawling forward to nose at her ear.

She sits with them until daybreak, glad she doesn’t have classes to teach anymore, and when Remus shrinks back to an unconscious human, the dog watches her expectantly. She transforms, and almost immediately, Sirius joins her again as a human. 

(“Well that’s new, I think.” He rasps after a few seconds. “You look good.”

“You’re so thin.”

“Tends to happen when you’re living on a steady diet of vermin for months.”

“Can I treat you to dinner, then? Tonight?”)

She takes Remus back to the castle and gives him back the Map, and then hurries away to her office to rapidly pack all her things—by the end of the day, she’ll be Apparating out of the Shack with Sirius, back to her house. The Prophet proclaims Pettigrew’s rediscovery and arrest and the castle is in an uproar with it all morning. The crime reporters must be working overtime, since a supplementary edition comes out shortly afterwards with even more details—that the Minister is personally overseeing a trial to take place in late June, that Pettigrew’s testimony could exonerate Sirius, that Sirius had never had a trial in the first place, and that in light of recent developments, the Kiss-on-sight order was being rescinded. 

But not everything is hunky-dory. Snape, spiteful that Sirius isn’t guilty after all and that she’d manipulated him by throwing around Lily’s name (even if only for five minutes, even if for a good cause) leaks Remus’ secret over breakfast; her friend resigns. It’s her fault, and she apologizes once she finds out. He sighs that the job was Cursed anyway, that this was bound to happen eventually. He doesn’t say if he’ll come by the estate anytime soon, so she takes that as him needing space. 

In Great Cheverell, she shoves Sirius toward one of the billion guest bathrooms for a shower and orders a lot of takeaway (after months at Hogwarts, she has no food in the house). They don’t talk much during dinner—she’s honestly just so happy to see him eat. 

They talk afterward. She apologizes for not trusting him, for not rescuing him, for not fighting for him. He apologizes for not trusting her either—he’d been just as suspicious of her during the war as she had been of him. He’d seen some of her notebooks littered in Dark runes, heard her muttering their incantations in her sleep. That alone hadn’t been enough to make him suspicious (he knew what her job was), but one of their neighbors had suddenly asked him if she was doing okay. The elderly lady had been worried after her sudden questioning about anyone who might have been seen entering the flat. He hadn’t fully trusted her thereafter. 

They talk about Azkaban, about his escape, about her time in Italy running with werewolves who had since become vigilantes. About her and Remus’ failed attempts to adopt Harry. About what she did to the man who killed Alessandra. The Blood Rune she used during the war. The Auror training he never told her about. Her descent into workaholism that also teetered on alcoholism at times, her remodeling efforts, how she became an Animagus to try to fill the Marauder-shaped void that Sirius’ arrest, Peter’s betrayal, and James’ death had left for Remus. She talks more than he does, but that’s just because there’s only so much to say about his twelve years in Azkaban and subsequent year on the run. 

She doesn’t say anything about Regulus, though. 

(The sun is peeking through the curtains—it’s probably mid-morning. They’re no longer on opposite sides of her coffee table but leaning forward from opposite ends of the same couch, legs intertwined. 

“I saw your Patronus, in December, when you were going to the Castle.”

She smiles, sadly. “I couldn’t help it. All these years, and—”

“Ilene,” And it must be grave if he’s not using his nickname for her. “I’m not the same man they dragged to Azkaban thirteen years ago.” He pushes a loose strand of her hair from her face, tentatively. 

“And I’m not the same woman you left behind.”

“If we do this again,” he implores, “we can’t keep secrets.”

Ilene sighs, “I have one left. I haven’t told anyone, and I need to get it sorted, but it’s not my secret to tell. Not completely, anyway.” She pauses, then adds, “But I don’t think you’ll be upset by it.”

He watches her for a few silent seconds, then nods. “I trust you.”

She feels all the tension drain from her muscles. “And I trust you. Sweet Merlin, Sirius, I missed you so much.”

His smile is more brilliant than the sun.)

Pettigrew’s trial begins on schedule. In a surprisingly speedy public trial widely attended by members of the press and Wizarding Britain, the rat incriminates himself under Veritaserum as a turncoat, as the traitor who handed the Potters to Voldemort and framed Sirius Black for their deaths and for the murder of twelve muggles. The public defender looks like he’s working on other cases at his bench. 

(The one carried recommendation made by the public defender is a  _ priori incantatem  _ on Sirius’ confiscated wand, to determine the last spell performed with it. Thirteen years later, she almost breaks down in the observers’ section when they do— _ reparo _ . James’ glasses.)

Shortly before the trial ends, the Headmaster comes to visit them at Great Cheverell. After Dumbledore apologizes profusely to Sirius for having believed him to be the traitor, he, having surmised their intentions to adopt Harry, explains  _ why _ exactly he gave the child to his maternal aunt. Sirius is not hearing anything against their plan. There’s a lengthy argument; Sirius produces letter after letter from his godson that indicates the Dursleys are distant at best and abusive at worst, that there’s no reasonable way that anyone could think Harry considers it ‘home.’ Ilene, thinking of how Harry freely admitted to all the times that Voldemort has tried to kill him, puts forward this: a Fidelius on their home, with Dumbledore as Secret Keeper. Sirius calls it drastic, but Dumbledore considers it. 

Pettigrew is convicted on counts of murder, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to genocide, and Illegal Class A Transfiguration; his sentence is the Kiss. Ilene can’t seem to find an ounce of sympathy in her. Sirius immediately owls Harry to let him know, tells him to pack his things. 

(They perform the charm. Dumbledore writes the Secret on a scrap of paper that Ilene keeps wedged inside a copy of  _ A History of Magic _ on page 414.)

Days later, the Minister extends Sirius a full public pardon, offering to return his wand. Sirius, looking hale and healthy after several weeks of eating regularly, swans into the Ministry with Ilene at his side, to the delight of the press and onlookers. Sirius is restored as a full citizen, cleared of all wrongdoing, and the penalty for being an illegal Animagus is counted against his time served. Then, they beeline for the Magical Registrar. 

James and Lily’s Will is ironclad—Sirius puts the paperwork through in record time and by the end of the day, they’re standing outside Number Four Privet Drive, clad in muggle clothes and Ilene fingering the paper in her pocket. 

(They should’ve been able to do this years ago.)

(Her dress makes her look oddly like a 1950s TV housewife and his leather jacket and dark jeans are artfully battered and bohemian (and if they weren’t on a mission, she would’ve dragged Sirius back home and had her way with him first). It’s no wonder that Harry’s cousin looks very confused at these two adults who look like they’ve just stepped off the set of  _ Grease _ . 

His mother, when she comes up behind him in the entryway, less so. 

“Hi, Petunia. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Ilene smiles, trying hard not to think about how bad Harry’s letters to Sirius have made them sound. 

Petunia makes an oddly strangled sound, bustles forward, and practically pulls them off the threshold, slamming the door behind them and looking furtively through the paned door windows, as if scanning for onlookers. Seemingly satisfied, she turns a glare on them: “You’re here for the boy I take it. He’s upstairs, the small bedroom on the right.” And she walks  _ away _ from them, like she’s not just setting guests loose in her house. Ilene and Sirius exchange a glance but take the stairs two at a time—he’s ahead of her, pulling her along as fast as her long dress will allow. 

Harry, after a moment of shock, rushes Sirius with a yelp and a hug; she’s reminded almost forcibly of watching her boyfriend hold him as a newborn, how their lives could’ve been so different. She’s stunned out of her reverie when Harry releases Sirius to quickly hug her as well. Soon, Harry and Sirius are talking at a click per minute, asking questions about the trial, about the summer, about everything. He’s already packed, so they heft his stuff and walk out with only a wave to the Dursleys. 

When she turns around once they’ve loaded Harry’s things into the boot of her car, she thinks Mr. Dursley has gone purple at the sight of the Ferrari they’ve arrived in. The discoloration only seems to intensify when she hops in the drivers’ side.)

The bedroom Harry gets in Great Cheverell is at least twice the size of what he’d had at the Dursleys, and she takes great pride in the way his face lights up when he sees it, decked out already in Gryffindor colors. He settles in easily, happily touring the house and the grounds, making use of the pool (Ilene had to buy him swimming clothes, since the Dursleys hadn’t bothered), spending hours in the library or in one of her three-billion lounge rooms. Sometimes he visits his friends—Ilene usually drives him over, since the Fidelius makes it impossible to register their house to the Floo and side-along Apparition is a bitch and a half. Plus, it’s only an hour drive and she’s happy just to talk to the kid. 

(Also, fielding Arthur Weasley’s eager questions about her particular type of car is always an enjoyable experience.) 

Sirius takes great pleasure in introducing Harry to the record collection and gallivanting around Wizarding London with him. Ilene is the go-to tour guide for Muggle London and is thrilled to take him around all the touristy things that the Dursleys never would’ve. Plus, she’s the one with the proverbial balls to drive around London. She tells stories of his parents—Sirius knew James best, but Ilene knew Lily, and it would’ve been awful lopsided if he’d only had stories of his father. 

Harry’s a good kid—he offers to help cook on the nights that they attempt it and helps to clear the table and clean up afterwards no matter how many times they tell him he doesn’t have to. She thinks it’s at least partially because he can do those tasks with magic now. 

(Mid-way through July, she sees Remus Apparate outside the gates of the house; the confusion is apparent on his face.

She appears a foot in front of him, shouting, “Don’t move, wait right there!” and Apparates into her library for the Secret and pops back out, proudly handing him the scrap. 

He reads it, hands it back to her, and asks, “A Fidelius?”

“Harry’s here.” She pauses at the threshold, “Look, Remus, I’m really sorry. I got tunnel-vision and I fucked it up for you in the process, and that’s on me.”

“You couldn’t’ve known that Snape would take it out on me.” He shakes his head.)

Remus spends the full moon gallivanting around the property with Sirius; Ilene and Harry stay inside, occasionally glancing out the windows to see a fearsome werewolf playing chase with a Grim over a squishy orange ball. 

Within a week, Regulus will show up in the town of Great Cheverell, having received the coded message she left for him at the Saint-Benoît-du-Sault town hall almost a month ago, that Sirius is innocent and that there might be  _ more. _ It’ll shatter the idyll, but until then, all will be well. 

_ Fin. _

**Author's Note:**

> A second part is plausible, but remote and highly predicated on finishing my HP Re-Read. 
> 
> The working title for this monstrosity was “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me.” 
> 
> Current title from "Faster than Light" by Unleash the Archers.


End file.
